Here's why your favorite websites were down today

Getty ImagesAmazon Web Services, the remote data centers that power some of the world's most popular websites, is experiencing a big disruption that's making numerous apps and websites — including Business Insider — difficult to access for many users.

On its status page on Tuesday, Amazon places the blame with its S3 storage service, which it says is seeing "high error rates" for websites and apps hosted from its flagship US East (Northern Virginia) Region data center.

Among the sites and services that appear to be affected are Slack, Quora, Lonely Planet, Snapchat's Bitmoji, and even the US Securities and Exchange Commission website.

Amazon S3 is a very common service that sites use to store files, and the US East data center is one of its biggest facilities, meaning that this is wreaking havoc all over the web. Sites like Imgur use S3 to store their photo files, for instance, making those sites slow to load, if they load at all.

"We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue," an Amazon spokesperson said on Tuesday afternoon about 1 p.m. PST.

Notably, this isn't technically an "outage," since Amazon's S3 is not entirely out of commission and some services are only partially affected.

In an ironic twist, Amazon Web Services tweeted that the "dashboard" that allows users to see the status of its own services was not able to update itself because of the S3 technical problem.

Given Amazon's massive reach, cut your favorite sites a little slack if they're acting funny today — it might not be their fault.